Friday, October 01, 2004

Open source programmers have been found to be in breach of the DMCA for producing the bnetd server created, in the words of the decision, to address the difficulties that users sometimes experienced with [Blizzard Entertainment and Vivendi Universal Games Inc.'s] Battle.net service. In addition, some or all of the defendents developed bnetd, in part, because they believed that Blizzard game players should not be forced to view advertisements displayed via the Battle.net service and that it was morally wrong for Blizzard to require people who want to play Blizzard's games over the Internet ot agree to the Battle.net TOU or other restrictions imposed by Blizzard. The bnetd project is a volunteer effort and the bnetd project has always offered the bnetd program for free to anyone who wants a copy of it."

As well as breaching the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, the programmers were held to have violated Blizzard's end user license agreement (EULA).

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